Chapter 147: — "Guess Who"

Nothing.

She waited.

Come on. Six years. Say something withering. Say something with the eyes.

Nothing.

Not a word, not a flinch, no hand coming up to take her wrists. Just a person sitting very still under her hands on a wall by a road, doing absolutely nothing about it.

That’s not right.

Nobody does that. You put your hands over a person’s eyes and they do something—

Six seconds. Seven.

Oh no.

He’d known at four paces.

The road changed sound behind him and he had not turned round, because a man who turns round every time somebody walks past becomes a thing people talk about, and he had been very careful for a year not to become that.

Three paces. Two.

Turn round.

He didn’t.

And then two hands came over his eyes.

Something happened in his chest that he did not have a word for and never afterward found one.

He knew.

Not from the voice. Before the voice — at the grass, at four paces, from the specific way the sound of a road changes when somebody who moves like that walks on it.

He could feel the cold in her fingers. He could feel a callus at the base of her right hand that had not been there when she was sixteen.

Six years. Two of them without a letter. One without knowing whether she was breathing.

He had built this perhaps four thousand times and had never once got past the first four seconds — and now the first four seconds were happening, and they were nothing like any version he had made. Because in none of them had she been laughing. In none of them had she covered his eyes like a child at a fair.

She doesn’t know it’s me.

That was the whole of it.

She’s been gone six years and she’s put her hands over a stranger for fun and she has no idea.

And he understood, in about half a second, with total clarity, that the instant he spoke it would end. She’d take her hands away, and this would become the other thing — the enormous unmanageable thing with two years of silence in it and a mountain and a shut road.

So he said nothing.

Four seconds. Five. Six.

He would not apologise for those six seconds to anybody, ever.

She took her hands away.

“Oh — sorry. Sorry, wrong person, I thought you were—”

Evelyne.

Which was, she had approximately one second to recognise, an insane thing to have thought.

Because the last time she’d seen Evelyne Blanchett, Evelyne had been sixteen and standing in a corridor being deliberately unhelpful about a lift, and there was no reason on this earth for her to be sitting on a wall four hundred miles south — and Seraphina had seen long dark hair from behind and her entire brain had produced black hair, sitting alone, ignoring everyone, obviously Evelyne in under a second and she had gone up the grass on her toes like an idiot.

Six years of the most careful work in the northern passes.

Undone by a hairstyle.

He turned round.

And she stopped talking.

Because it was not a face she knew.

Hair loose over both shoulders, one thin braid on the left. Nothing falling forward. No fringe. A face completely, deliberately open — and grey eyes, and a jaw that was frankly unreasonable, and she thought that exact word and then thought:

Oh, come ON.

Six years in a country made of rock and I get home and there’s a man sitting on a WALL like that—

She had about a second and a half of this.

Then she remembered there was a house to get to, and parents, and a bench somewhere with a man on it who had bread, and she said:

“Right. Sorry. Again. Genuinely, I’ll—”

And turned to go.

And behind her, someone said:

“Aina.”

She stopped walking.

Nobody called her that.

Two people in the world had ever called her that and one of them was her mother, and her mother said it differently. It wasn’t a name. It wasn’t short for anything. It was a thing one specific person had said at four years old because Seraphina had been too long a word, and had gone on saying for fifteen years, and had never once said in front of anybody else.

She turned round very slowly.

He was standing.

And she looked at that face — the same face, the identical face, the one she’d decided ninety seconds ago was unreasonable — and everything behind her eyes rearranged itself violently and at once, like a room being shown to her with the lamp finally lit.

“…Kael?”

He didn’t answer.

“Kael.”

Nothing.

“Kael—”

And she was moving, and did not remember deciding to.

“Kael — Kael, it’s you, it’s — oh my god, it’s you, what have you done to your — your hair, Kael, your—”

He went down.

Not slowly. Not dramatically. His knees simply stopped participating, and he went down in the road four feet in front of her and put a hand flat on the ground and did not get up.

She stopped.

“Kael—”

And then she saw his face and every word she had ever known left her at once.

He was crying.

Kael Arden was crying — kneeling in a road at seventh bell in the morning with both shoulders going, making almost no sound at all, which was by a considerable margin the worst part.

She had seen him bleed. She had seen him take a blow that broke something and stand up and not mention it for a week. She had seen him at eleven, at the funeral, standing at the back with his hands at his sides doing absolutely nothing with his face for two hours.

Never this.

“Kael—”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not—”

“Don’t,” he said. “For a minute.”

And put his hand over his eyes.

She got down.

Not gracefully. She dropped onto her knees in the road with about as much dignity as he had and did not touch him, because she genuinely did not know whether she was allowed to — which was its own kind of horror after years.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t.”

“No — Kael, I’m sorry, I didn’t write, I know it’s years, I know exactly how many days it is, I’ve counted—”

“Aina.”

“—and there wasn’t one day, not one, where I—”

“Aina.”

She stopped.

He took his hand away from his eyes.

“I don’t care,” he said.

She was taller.

That was the first thing his brain produced and he was appalled at it even as it arrived — a year of not knowing whether she was breathing, and what he got was she’s taller.

Then: her hair’s gone.

Short. Swept back off her face. Nothing in front of her eyes at all, and it made her look — he hunted for the word and couldn’t find one and settled, privately, on finished. Like something that had been in progress the entire time he’d known her and had arrived.

A mark across her left cheekbone that would fade and hadn’t yet.

Her hands were wrecked.

She was kneeling in a road at twenty-one, in a coat that had been very good about two years ago, apologising to him — and he had spent six years maintaining a picture of a sixteen-year-old, and known it was wrong, and been completely wrong about how it was wrong.

He had prepared for less.

That was the shameful part, and he would not say it aloud for a long time. Somewhere underneath, in the place where the four-in-the-morning thinking happened, he had made himself ready for someone worn down. Someone the six years had taken something out of.

And instead she had come round a bend in the road and put her hands over his eyes and told him to guess.

You’ve got better, he thought, kneeling in the dirt with his face ruined. Six years and you’ve somehow got better. You were the best thing I’d ever seen at sixteen and you’ve gone and improved on it, which I did not believe was a direction that was available to anyone.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You’re crying and staring—”

“Yes,” said Kael.

“You didn’t say anything,” she said.

“When.”

“When I had my hands over your — you knew. Straight away. Didn’t you.”

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you say something—”

He looked at the ground.

“Because you were laughing,” he said.

She stopped.

“Because you were laughing,” he said again, “and you had your hands over my eyes, and for six seconds it was the best thing that had happened to me in six years, and I knew that the second I said your name it would be over.”

The road was very quiet.

“So I let it run,” he said. “And I’m not sorry.”

She sat back on her heels in the dirt.

“…You’ve got worse,” she said, unsteadily.

“I’ve had lessons.”

“You’ve had what—”

“Four years,” said Kael. “Three nights a week. Daren and Tax. I’ll explain it badly later.”

And she made a sound that was not entirely a laugh, and put both hands over her face, and stayed like that for a while.